ASHLEY LOOKS TO KEEP PUSHING THE PLAYHOUSE

New faces, fresh ideas and a pioneering spirit are the common threads running through the new year’s biggest and most attention-getting theater events. Here’s a look at some of the intriguing places the San Diego region’s stage artists promise to take us in 2013:

Old Globe’s new leader

It is San Diego’s flagship theater, with nearly eight decades of distinguished history. It regularly stages major world premieres and has sent 20-plus shows to Broadway, although none in the past five years. The last individual to serve as its artistic director — by that title, anyway — is a multiple Tony Award winner and one of the most in-demand directors on Broadway.

It’s also an institution that’s coming off one of its more tumultuous periods of recent years.

That’s the backdrop Barry Edelstein has been left to contemplate as he settles into his new job as artistic chief of the Old Globe.

But no pressure.

Actually, Edelstein has plenty of his own history — and track record of success — in taking on top jobs at high-visibility institutions. The seasoned director comes to the Globe from New York’s renowned Public Theater, where he headed up all Shakespeare programming, including the iconic Shakespeare in the Park.

It’ll be a little while yet before Edelstein’s full artistic influence takes hold at the Globe: Nearly all of the theater’s announced productions came together before he officially joined in November.

Still, it’s shaping up to be an eventful year for the Balboa Park institution, with an impressively cast revival of “Pygmalion” in January and the world-premiere musical adaptation of the TV series “The Honeymooners” in September. (That show has all the hallmarks of a Broadway hopeful.)

With the future wide open for the theater and its Shakespeare-centric new leader, the words of the Bard (from “Hamlet”) seem apt: “We know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

La Jolla Playhouse

Since its revival three decades ago, the Playhouse has built a rep as one of the more adventurous of major regional theaters. Under artistic director Christopher Ashley, that spirit of inquiry and experimentation has taken new forms.

Last year, the theater launched “Without Walls,” a series dedicated to site-specific works. In 2013, not only will WoW (in Playhouse shorthand) continue, but it will be blossom into a full festival in the fall. The event will include the return of “The Car Plays: San Diego,” a series of short works performed inside actual vehicles. (“Car Plays” was a major critical and audience success this year.)

Now the Playhouse also has added the DNA New Work Series, an initiative meant to foster plays at their very earliest stages of development. (It complements the theater’s existing Page to Stage program, which brings more fully realized workshop productions and has birthed such eventual Broadway successes as “I Am My Own Wife” and “Peter and the Starcatcher.”)

DNA debuts in January with “Chasing the Song,” which reunites director Ashley with the creators of the Playhouse-launched, Tony-winning musical “Memphis.” This piece about a hot young songwriter seems a fitting launch: Like the series, the play is all about the creative process.

Pushing the boundaries

At theaters large and small here, 2013 is shaping up to be a year of testing new ideas and getting outside comfort zones.

San Diego Rep’s “Federal Jazz Project,” an ambitious musical event masterminded by Culture Clash co-founder Richard Montoya, will document and celebrate San Diego’s jazz heritage, with a score composed and curated by the distinguished local bandleader and musician Gilbert Castellanos.

Moxie Theatre and Mo`olelo Performing Arts Company will engage in their first-ever collaboration on “The Bluest Eye,” adapted by Lydia Diamond from the novel by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison. Ion Theatre will stage only the second American production of the British playwright Simon Stephens’ “Punk Rock.” Cygnet finally brings its long-awaited staging of Stephen Sondheim’s edgy “Assassins,” North Coast Rep introduces San Diego to the much-admired, war-related drama “Time Stands Still,” and Diversionary offers something utterly different — and presumably less serious — with Phil Johnson and Ruff Yeager’s world-premiere work “She-Rantulas From Outer Space!”

Then, July brings the inaugural San Diego Fringe Festival, co-produced by the Actors Alliance of San Diego and the up-and-coming troupe Circle Circle Dot Dot.

Plenty to check out — and savor — for those who prefer their theater on the wilder side.